Beautiful and damned

When F Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in 1925 it was largely ignored. But 70 years on, it sells in millions, has been filmed three times and sits high in the American consciousness. Mark Lawson assesses the enduring appeal of a novel that embodies the glamour and also the flipside of the American Dream

If Jay Gatsby, the great American millionaire, had lived to 70, there would have been a hell of a party at his Long Island mansion. But Gatsby was murdered at an age we know, only, to have been 'a year or two over thirty,' his mansion left abandoned.

The story of his life, however, has, blessedly reached the age of 70. The Great Gatsby, the novel by F Scott Fitzgerald, was published in 1925. Septuagenarian texts are relatively rare - most books vanish within years - and even fewer celebrate seven decades in such excellent shape.

Some 300,000 copies a year are sold in America, where it has become the book most often set on school and college literature courses. It has been filmed three times, most recently in 1974 by Jack Clayton, with Robert Redford in the title role.

John Updike has recently noted that Fitzgerald stands among American writers as 'the third of a sacred trinity whose two other members are Hemingway and Faulkner.' Neither of those two writers though, wrote a single book which is as widely known or generally disseminated as The Great Gatsby. The occasion of the novel's landmark anniversary offers a chance to examine the extraordinary durability of a book of only around 160 pages which was dismissed by many of its first reviewers as an 'entertaining anecdote'.

The Great Gatsby was conceived in unpromising circumstances, chillingly depicted in Matthew J Bruccoli's biography of the author, Some Sort Of Epic Grandeur. Fitzgerald began writing it in 1924, the period which became known as 'The Jazz Age', and of which he would become one of the principal adornments. Aged 28, he had published one novel and three volumes of short stories, which had originally been written for the lucrative magazine market. With his wife, Zelda, he was living recklessly beyond his earnings in Great Neck, Long Island. Drinking too much, spending too freely, he was traumatised by the failure of his Broadway play, The Vegetable, and by Zelda's infidelity.

In April 1924, however, having cleared his immediate debts with speedy magazine work, the author wrote in his journal: 'Out of the woods at last and starting a novel.' He booked a cruise to Europe - deliberately choosing an unlicensed ship to avoid temptation - and set to work. The novel he wrote was a story of the glamorous Long Island society to which he and Zelda had achieved heavily mortgaged access.

Set around the fictional communities of East Egg and West Egg - two adjoining oval outcrops of land off Long Island - the book is narrated by Nick Carraway, a bond dealer renting a house one summer across the bay from the mansion inhabited by Jay Gatsby, a socialite who is charismatic but mysterious - 'They say that he killed a man once' is the popular gossip around the Eggs - and famous for his lavish parties.

Gatsby chose the house to be close to Daisy, a love of his youth, who is now married to a boorish former athlete, Tom Buchanan. The action of the novel charts Gatsby's renewed pursuit of Daisy and ends with his murder by a garage mechanic, Wilson, provoked by Buchanan into believing that Gatsby killed his wife in a hit-and-run accident, which was in fact the fault of Daisy. The arrival of Gatsby's father for the funeral clarifies some of the details of his identity.

This slight tale, told in coolly beautiful prose, came perilously close to being titled The High-Bouncing Lover or Trimalchio In West Egg (a classical reference from Petronius) or Under The Red White Blue and, although The Great Gatsby now seems to us impeccably enticing and resonant, Fitzgerald blamed his selection of this title for the book's poor performance on publication. Though favourably reviewed, it sold poorly and by 1929 - when Fitzgerald could earn $4,000 for a single short story for a magazine - his royalties from The Great Gatsby and six other books in print totalled $31.77.

In the next decade, Fitzgerald became a bitter drunk, doing hackwork in Hollywood. He died four days before Christmas in 1940, aged 44, of a heart attack to which his drinking had almost certainly contributed. His final royalty statement had arrived in August, crediting him $13.13 from sales that year of a total of 40 copies of his books. The curve of his career from promise to neglect seemed a classic literary tragedy.

In the 50 years after his death, however, sales have exceeded 12 million, a majority of them being The Great Gatsby. Why has this novel lived - or, rather, been spectacularly resurrected from neglect - to become such a definitive American fiction?

The year in which a book is published is to some extent arbitrary - depending on such factors as the author's birth date, their diligence towards deadlines, and publishing schedules - but a work will still often spring from the moment of history in which it is written and certain books are seen in retrospect to have been produced at some kind of cultural cusp.

The mid-twenties were, in general, a prelapsarian period, before the stock market crash of 1929 and the depression of the 1930s. And The Great Gatsby - like many of the novels produced on the eve of the two world wars - carries a sense of the impending catastrophe. On the penultimate page, a car pulls up in the night at Gatsby's abandoned mansion, and Carraway concludes that it is 'some final guest who... didn't know that the party was over.'

It seems clear to modern readers that if Jay Gatsby had not been shot he would very likely have turned a gun on himself as his finances unravelled in 1929. In his script for the 1974 Jack Clayton film, Francis Ford Coppola deliberately pointed up this sense of a desperate last summer of excess. A character says he must leave the party and get back to Wall Street, and another replies: 'Wall Street will still be there tomorrow!'

But, even beyond the general resonances of the middle of that decade, 1925 does seem to have been a pivotal moment in internal and external perceptions of America. In July of that year, shortly after Fitzgerald's novel had been published, the teacher John T Scopes was put on trial in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching evolutionary theory in schools. The so-called 'monkey trial' was the beginning of two currents in American society which have surged for 70 years: the use of the legal system as a moral crucible and the pull of Christian fundamentalism.

The latter is prefigured in The Great Gatsby, in which the brutal Tom Buchanan first declares that 'civilisation's going to pieces' and then talks about people 'sneering at family life and family institutions'. It is his particular view that white middle-class Americans are under threat from blacks. 'Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilisation,' writes Fitzgerald, a phrase which, to a reader in 1995, perfectly captures the current rhetoricians of the new right.

It also now seems spookily significant that the other major American novel published in 1925 should have been Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, a book in which a poor boy achieves great social wealth and power through the beautiful democracy of the American economy, but is eventually executed for murdering a pregnant mistress to preserve his glamorous existence.

Dreiser's book is eerily close in theme to The Great Gatsby - a book which might itself well have been titled An American Tragedy - and there is no doubt that it was these two novels that first identified a perception of the so-called 'American Dream' as fatuous and ruinous and illusory: an idea which is at the heart of most intelligent modern writing and thinking about the country. Almost all the US news magazines used the headline AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY on their first cover stories about O J Simpson and, though the words were Dreiser's, the shorthand comprehension of what it meant was to the credit of Fitzgerald, for it is his novel that has become a central American legend.

The modern reader - perhaps, particularly, the European reader - is astonished at the extent to which this is the country we have lived with through what has so often been called The American Century. Carraway, who represents the cool, reticent quasi-European sensibility in contrast to Gatsby's hedonistic New World optimism, finds himself 'simultaneously enchanted and repelled' by Gatsby's world, a now almost standard 20th-century reaction to America.

Jay Gatsby (born Jimmy Gatz) is - with his panache and his charm but also his secrets and his bleak and terrible end - a perfect prototype of the publicly successful American of the 20th century, anticipating so many presidents, movie stars, crooked financiers, novelists and pop stars we have known. They, like Gatsby, had 'an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness'. They 'paid a high price for living too long with a single dream' because 'foul dust floated in the wake of (their) dreams'. They, as Fitzgerald says of Gatsby, had 'invented' themselves and 'to this conception' had been 'faithful to the end'.

When Gatsby dies, his old dad still believes that, 'If he'd of lived, he'd of been a great man... he'd of helped build up the country', but Carraway takes a phone call at the mansion which seems to establish that Gatsby was involved in illegal bond dealing. It was fitting that the Redford-Farrow movie version should have been released in 1974, the year of Watergate.

The Great Gatsby was also prescient in its depiction of two different Americas within the same country, inimical to each other: not the North and the South of the Civil War, but the East Coast and what we would now call Middle America, but is identified in the novel as the Middle West. This is where Gatsby, Tom, Daisy and Carraway all came from, and from where the narrator subsequently tells the story, concluding: 'I now see that this was a story of the West, after all... perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.'

In fact, The Great Gatsby is probably more significant to the history of the image and mythology of America than it is to the history of American literature, at least in terms of influence. Fitzgerald was the last great American writer to aspire almost wholly to a European style of writing. His models were Conrad - from whom the idea of the passive, observing narrator was borrowed - and Turgenev. It was FSF's great contemporary, Hemingway, who began to invent an American prose which generations of novelists would follow.

Fitzgerald's main stylistic innovation was in his early awareness of the possibility of cinematic effects in prose. Throughout The Great Gatsby, the writing is brightly aware of the way in which everything is lit. Recalling a walk to the bank where he worked, Carraway notes the way that 'the sun threw my shadow westward'. Daisy and Tom are first seen standing in a 'cheerful square of light'. From his childhood in the Middle West, Carraway remembers 'the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow'.

But what has kept the book shining is its illumination of the American Dream and its flipside, the American Tragedy, symbolised, in another of the text's numerous images of luminosity, by the 'green light' on the dock at the foot of Daisy's lawns, which draws Gatsby towards his fatal dream. Still in nearly perfect health at 70, this is the American novel of the century, the novel of the American century.